Q&A with Vice President Joe Biden

Vice President Joe Biden spent Thursday morning in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he visited a downtown train station renovated with a $235 million stimulus grant. He later flew back to Washington on Air Force Two, where he spoke with POLITICO senior writer Michael Grunwald and Washington Post reporter Jim Tankersley. Biden complained about the dour tone of the Democratic presidential primary but defended Bernie Sanders as a mainstream candidate, mocked the Republican Party and its leading presidential contenders, and made it clear that the White House isn't planning to replace Justice Antonin Scalia with a nominee who could be caricatured as a movement liberal. Here is the edited transcript of the interview.

Q: You’ve been talking about how the country is on the upswing, but the candidates for both parties are talking doom and gloom.

Story Continued Below

A: It’s a big mistake. Everybody’s making it. By the way, I just saw that new Rubio ad, with a tugboat with the Canadian flag in front of the city of Vancouver. When it goes bad, it goes bad. But look, this is totally, thoroughly objective: We are so much better positioned than anyone else in the world, for Christ’s sake. It’s not even close.

Are there problems? Yeah. What we should be doing is what Barack and I have been doing in the last two budgets. Granted, I’m more vocal about it than he is. But first of all, there’s a need for corporate responsibility. The idea that corporations have no responsibilities other than to their stockholders? That’s crap. Number two, between 2003 and 2012, corporate America made $2.7 trillion. That’s good stuff. Except 54% went to buy back their own stock. 37% was used for dividends for shareholders. Only 9% for everything else. My staff cautioned me not to make that speech at Davos, in front of 2500 of these guys, but I said, hey, you’ve got to change the culture. And by the way, bring those damn offshore profits home. This is crap.

Q: Now you’re talking about how things could be better, too. Are you surprised that’s the whole focus on the Democratic side?

A: I am surprised. Take a look at all the campaigns in the last cycle. The only Democrats who won close races were the ones that stuck with the administration, talked about the record…My generic point is, you get behind the curve. Even my own folks say, jeez, Joe, you got 60-70% of the American people think we’re going in the wrong direction. Don’t try to buck it. What do you mean, don’t try to buck it? If everybody doesn’t buck it, guess what, it’s gospel. We must be in deep trouble. We must have really screwed the pooch.” When I agreed to, not take over, but full-time engage with the Democratic Senate campaign committee, I made a commitment that I will go wherever they want me, I said guys, I’m not going in and saying: Woe is me. We can’t just talk about billionaires and gay rights.

Q: Bernie has a particular critique of the economy: the banks are still massively dangerous, everything is working for the 1%, nobody is getting ahead. What do you make of it?

A: I think his conclusory comment is correct. The way everything is stacked up now, it’s all going to the 1%...There are half a dozen votes I regret, out of about 18,000. One of them is the repeal of Glass-Steagall. It was part of a big package. But it was wrong…There are still significant elements of the way the banks do business that should be clipped. For example, we should be putting an extra tax on banks that are taking risk. That’s just rational.

Q: Do you think Glass-Steagall should be reinstated?

A: If I could just snap my fingers, yeah, I’d reinstate Glass Steagall, or update it. But I think [the] Dodd-Frank [financial reform] went a long, long way. I think it’s good. I think it’s strong.

At any rate, back to your fundamental question, I’m going to get on thin ice. I said when I announced I wasn’t running, I’m not going to remain silent. I think both Hillary and Bernie are basically on the same page, with different emphasis, on college, Wall Street, the 1%, civil rights, etcetera. What I don’t think they’re spending enough time doing is pushing back on the story line that what we did to get us to this point was a failure and a mistake. When I campaign for House and Senate members, here’s what I do. I say it’s real simple. Here’s what we’re proposing to take us to the next step, and increase wages. And then take the Ryan budget, which is still their budget. It slashes everything. It’s just a fundamental refutation of everything we’ve done. It’s no different than the Bush II economic agenda.

Q: Bernie’s a socialist. He wants a revolution; it’s understandable that he’s saying everything is awful. But Hillary’s kind of running as the heir to you guys. Have you been surprised that she’s essentially saying the same thing, but also it’s even worse because there’s sexism and racism and homophobia?

A: The only thing I can figure is, they both have large campaign organization, with a lot of smart people that are probably politically smarter than I am. They must say there’s no way to sell a positive message. I don’t know.

Q: Have you talked to her?

A: It’s been about a month.

Q: You said yesterday, the middle class is still getting crushed.

A: Yes.

Q: Donald Trump supporters, Bernie Sanders supporters, are reflecting, the polls tell us, a lot of middle-class anxiety in this country. How much of that is your fault?

A: It’s legitimate criticism. But it begs the question, because of the dysfunction in Congress. If you take a look at what we proposed in those four years, if we had done what we proposed, I believe the middle class would be back again. So it’s not that we didn’t focus on it. We just couldn’t get it done. We didn’t have the votes to get it done. And one of the things that bothers me the most about where we are now is that it really is a poisonous environment, politically. I don’t know how we make progress without being able to generate some consensus. And I don’t know how we do that unless we change the tone. You could say, that’s easy for you to say, Joe, but you’re not running. Well, I think somebody’s got to start, and I think the public will respond to a change in the tone. You know, I got in trouble – I wasn’t talking about Hillary when I said Republicans aren’t my enemy. I forgot she had said it in the debate. But that attitude is pretty widespread. How the hell do we function if they look at us as the enemy and we look at them as the enemy?

I think that the majority – a bare majority of the Republicans in this House and Senate – know better. They want to compromise. And I think a clear majority of Democrats do. In both cases, it’s sort of the tail wagging the dog. I mean, I’m still able to get on the phone and quietly get things done with the chairmen up there, with McConnell and others. They’re scared to death.

Q: Have you talked to McConnell about the Supreme Court?

A: Not yet, I will.

Q: If you’re saying consensus building is what’s needed to bring back the middle class in this country – consensus building around good policy. Could that be what primary voters on both sides, particularly your side, should be thinking about?

A: I think so. I talk about it when I go out and campaign for Democratic candidates now, meaning House, Senate, governors. That’s what I talk about. And I’ve not had an audience not receive it well – I mean, a Democratic audience.

Q: But this is like the Trump moment, right?

A: I’m still not sure. You know, in the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king. Has he gotten above 38 percent in any primary? He’s 38 percent in the minority party – a minority within the minority party. So I don’t doubt that Trump moment. And, what is always the case in primaries, the most conservative and liberal elements of each party have a larger say than they do in the electoral process overall.

Q: Is he conservative?

A: No. I mean this guy is, look at the populist appeal. ‘We gotta take on Wall Street. We gotta take these guys on. They’re ripping you off. These corporations, they’re ripping you off. Look at what’s going on in trade, the sweetheart deals they’re making.’ He’s making a populist argument. That is not a traditional conservative Republican argument. So I think he is perfectly fit for the time in his party.

It’s a little bit like, remember back in 1972, I was running for the Senate, George McGovern was at the top of the ticket for God’s sake…It was the ascendancy of the left-left in the Democratic Party. This seems like a comparable moment in the Republican Party. It didn’t represent the Democrats then, and it doesn’t represent the majority of the Republican electorate now. The Republicans need significant independent support to win a general election, and I don’t see where Trump is getting that. My impression is that he doesn’t have that support.

Q: Does Ted Cruz?

A: No!

Q: Does Marco Rubio?

A: Well, Rubio, if he were a little sm—well, Marco Rubio could, but he missed it so far. That’s why you seem him now lurching towards Morning in America.

Q: Does Bernie Sanders represent that same left-left that McGovern did?

A: No, it goes beyond that. I’ve been saying for six years on the stump and inside the White House that the concentration of wealth is a gigantic problem, politically and economically.

Q: But he’s a socialist. Do you think a socialist can win a general election?

A: Look, what Bernie is talking about now is mainstream. The mainstream is saying wait a minute, the concentration of wealth is a disaster, and it’s unfair. Full-blown capitalists are saying that’s true, that’s not right. I haven’t heard him lay out in detail what the socialist part of his agenda is.

Q: Health care, right? Single-payer?

A: That was the president’s position, initially. That was Hillary’s position. I assume that was to get to the left of Hillary. But that was Hillary’s position on health care.

Q: When you think of your regrets, is failing to do something about the concentration of wealth up there?

A: Well, I did. I got $660 billion in tax increases for the wealthy [in the January 2013 “fiscal cliff” deal]. That’s a big frigging deal. I’m serious. Liberals got mad because they didn’t think I did enough to protect the earned income tax credit, but I did. They got everything they wanted. But the leadership got pissed off because I got put in a terrible position: remember, McConnell said he would only negotiate with Joe Biden…Harry Reid got mad. The House got mad. Why did Biden do this. But $660 billion!

Q: You were going to talk about the Supreme Court. Do you nominate a centrist? Someone who fires up the base?

A: Look, other than Jim Eastland I’ve presided over more nominees than anyone in history. I’ve written extensively on the role of the United States Senate. It does say advise and consent, and that’s real. It was never intended for the president to pick whoever he wants and that’s it. Looking back at the history of the Court, back to the first fights around Jefferson, there was a direct correlation between the Senate concluding they have the right to impact the philosophic disposition of the justice, and how much that justice appointed will change the court. This is a potential gigantic game-changer. My advice is, the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what we’ve done in the past. That’s how we got Justice Kennedy. He wasn’t a conservative’s conservative. He turned out to be exactly who he was. That’s how we got Souter, too. It was a critical moment in the balance of the court. So the president has to pick someone who is intellectually competent, a person of high moral character, someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesn’t come with a specific agenda. There are a whole hell of a lot of people who Republicans who have already voted for who fall into that category, in my view, and there are people they haven’t voted for yet. But the idea that we’re going to go in, and pick a new Justice Brennan, that’s not going to happen.

Q: So come on, do you wish you were running?

A: No, but I’m going to make my views known. And hopefully, it will impact the nature of the debate within the Democratic Party. It’s not about either one of the candidates; I can live with either one of them. I can support either one of them. I just have a different sense of how we should be talking about the issues that face us, to enhance the possibility that we keep the White House, and don’t have everything we fought for all this time undone.